Organic Universe

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Raping Mother Nature: The Scary Side of Synbio Glowing Plants

If you're like me, the concept of synthetic biology—the
application of engineering techniques to the building blocks of life—is
pretty hard to get your head around. I get synthesizing, say, material
to make clothes out of. But synthesizing new life forms? Apparently,
while I stand slack-jawed, the novel technology is quickly going
mainstream. Here's the New York Times:

Hoping to give new meaning to the term "natural light," a
small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a
project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for
trees that can replace electric street lamps and potted flowers luminous
enough to read by.

What could be more innocuous than plants that generate
useful light? And moreover, the "glowing plants" project isn't the work
of a big, bad multinational like Monsanto or a corporate-funded academic
lab, the Times notes, but rather a "small group of hobbyist
scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories
springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to
give rise to a do-it-yourself movement."

And they're not financing the project by tapping Wall
Street or big banks, but rather the democratic cash-raising method of
our age par excellence, the Kickstarter campaign. The project launched
April 23 with a goal to raise $65,000; it has already exceeded $480,000 in pledges, aided by glowing—so to speak—reports in Tech Crunch, Fast Company, andForbes, as well as the promise that anyone who commits at least $40 will "receive seeds to grow a glowing plant at home."

What could possibly go wrong? Well, I don't know much about
the science of creating living lamps. But I do think it's important to
think out the broader implications of synbio—as the novel technology is
known—and ask questions about how its release from the lab into the
world is regulated. Which is evidently pretty lightly—this consortium is
casually promising to distribute glowing seeds to hundreds of people.

I can't think of a better source for examining the promise and perils of synbio than this much-cited 2007 essay by the eminent physicist—and climate change skeptic—Freeman Dyson. In it, he laid out a rosy vision for what he called the "domestication of biotechnology." Here's Dyson:

There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will
use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids.
Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to
breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their
kits too. Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of
housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new
living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big
corporations prefer.

And what about the obvious dangers—what if these God-like
"housewives and children" (ugh) turned away from conjuring cuddly
creatures and start creating ones designed to bare their fangs, monsters
instead of pets? You don't even need to presume malicious intent to
find reason for concern: What if some novel beast designed for cuteness
escapes, goes rogue, and turns out to have unintended malign powers?
Then there are the obvious questions: What if these new life forms
behave in ways we can't predict—or mutate in ways we can't
predict—altering food chains or larger biosystems? Dyson acknowledged
the "real and serious dangers" of synbio, and allowed that "rules and
regulations will be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger
themselves and others." But he waved off that task—not his problem. "I
leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers," he
cheerfully declared.

But regulating novel technologies has proven difficult here
in the United States. Genetically modified seeds burst onto US farm
fields in the mid-'90s with a notoriously lax regulatory process, as I
showed in this post. Still, the process is time-consuming, and it has been known to occasionally at least delay particularly problematic crop varieties, like new ones genetically rigged to withstand not one but two herbicides.
Next came nanotechnology, which takes advantage of the fact that common
substances like silver behave differently when they're really, really
small. Nanotech is now ubiquitous, showing up everywhere from underwear
to toothpaste. But as the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist
Andrew Schneider showed in an eye-opening 2010 series, the small stuff poses significant risks, has received little independent testing, and is barely regulated.

The excellent watchdog org ETC Group, which seeks to place novel technologies under democratic oversight, has launched a rival "Kickstopper" campaign to halt such projects until a proper regulatory regime can be put into place.

In the spirit of Professor Dyson, let me offer a prediction for the
future. I imagine that synbio's current reputation as a democratic
technology dominated by well-meaning amateurs will last just long enough
to convince people that it requires little or no regulation. While this
laissez-faire regime congeals into a settled fact, big agrichemical,
pharmaceutical, and life-sciences firms will quietly take it over,
eventually dominating the research and deployment of Dyson's wondrous
toys. Monsanto has already bought its way into the space—in January, it bought an R&D lab from
and entered a research collaboration with Synthetic Genomics, a company
that uses synthetic microbes to "improve crop productivity."

Unless we have a serious national reckoning on synbio, what we risk
leaving our children and grandchildren is the knotty problem of trying
to convince an entrenched, little-regulated industry that the power of
generating life forms should be used for the broad interests of society,
not the narrow ones of shareholders.

About the Author

Tom Philpott is the food and ag correspondent for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. RSS | Twitter

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